You can thank the Supreme Court for that. Schools were allowed newspaper censorship as a result of a 1985 case concerning a newspaper wanting to publish an article about teen pregnancy. The case is Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. Some more info can be found here.
I'm making my girlfriend do that, see them all in numerical order. I'm pushing for a one night Star Wars-a-thon, but I think we'll have to settle on a movie-a-night deal and spread it out over a week. It's been three years of waiting (I decided to do this right before seeing Attack of the Clones myself, since I just found out then she'd never seen a single Star Wars). Unfortunately, she knows Vader is Luke's dad (stupid pop culture references), so that part kind of loses its punch. We'll see how this goes in late May.
Anyone see this on the iPod Shuffle page at Apple? Read footnote 2: Do not eat iPod shuffle. It's a reference to this image at the Apple site that shows the relative size of the Shuffle. This is almost as good as the whole "Cookies are a Delicious Treat" thing or whatever it is in Firefox.
There are 2 main reasons for Indian students to go into advanced degree programs (this info culled from my discussions with a number of Indian students): 1) Security - job markets are unstable, especially with just a Bachelor's...at least with a Master's or PhD you have a little more flexibility and aren't quite as easily replaced as someone with an MBA (even though the MBA's make a ton more money) This is also important for Visa-retention reasons. 2) It's an easier way to enter the US - getting a job straight from India is hard because of linguistic differences (Indians speak English very well, but communicating effectively still requires some American English) or because it's not that cost-efficient to interview someone halfway around the world when someone similar in skill is probably in the US. I'm not from India though (second-generationer myself), so this is all just based on casual conversations with people. Take it with a grain of garam masala.
Grad schools, from what I understand (I went straight to grad school for various reasons) take work experience as sort of a bonus, if it's relevant. They usually just make sure your previous schooling was sufficient and that you somehow demonstrate through your application that you are capable of handling the rigors of grad school. It's almost more an evaluation of potential rather than actual merit, since a smart but lazy student is much much worse than a hard-working dumbass, because grad school is work, not just book smarts. I would beef up your application by mentioning any projects you worked on long term at your job, any self-motivated work you've done (in or out of work), etc...Also mention how you've stayed in touch with the computer engineering world (if your specialty is VLSI, for example, then maybe if you continually read the appropriate IEEE journal, mention that). I know a few people that went nuts during the dot-com days by getting all sorts of high-$ IT jobs, and then years later came back for an applied physics PhD. Good luck. Oh, and get used to the pay cut...actually, you're comign from India, so the pay will be about the same:)
If you care for these "ultimate" reinventions Marvel is fond of (I only like Ultimate X-Men, myself), then it might interest you to know that Orson Scott Card is writing Ultimate Iron Man when it debuts in March. I'm not sure how long he's signed up for, but I'd guess no more than 12 issues. See here for details. For those not up on comics, the quick summary is that the "ultimate" line is Marvel's way of restarting their characters from scratch so as to draw in new readers who don't want to fuck around with the 40 years of storylines.
I'm fairly certain CD sales are tracked based on unit codes/UPC's or whatever, which should be lacking on pirated copies. So...they won't factor into the CD sales figures. I think.
The future's so bright, I gotta wear used shades!
on
iTunes Accepts PayPal
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· Score: 3, Funny
First Paypal then...eBay itself! Imagine being able to auction off iTunes songs you thought were badass but now think are just ass (I'm talking to you, Incubus fans) via the iTunes music store interface. Oh yeah, and Apple could control supply of super-popular songs to prop up its eBay side in a sort of DeBeer's-ish artificial price inflation mechanism. What? Little Miss Jailbait's latest hot-hot-hot single is burning up the charts? Too bad, only 100 people can buy the song directly. I guess this would be a good time for one of those trez-fashionable Slashdot "1)X 2)Y 3)?? 4)Profit!" sort of lines.
I assumed the DS would tank since most people who like handhelds already own an SP, and the DS just seemed sort of awkward and gimmicky to me. But lo and behold, it's actually selling pretty well. So I'm just going to bite my tongue and let what happens with the PSP happen. I would imagine it would not sell that well since it is high-priced and faces a market that is already heavy in Nintendo handhelds (especially since it will come after the holidays and the new DS entry)...but what do I know?
Re:America, where just mentioning the word "Nigger
on
New Games Journalism
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· Score: 1
By "in Russia" do you mean present-day Russia or "in Soviet Russia"? I think well all know what happens if it's the latter...
I'm thinking it has to do with the book deal. They have a (shitty) deal with some publisher that ran off somewhere, more or less, and I think they're in court to try and get out of the contract so they can get books out for the first five years of strips. I think.
Comparing Carbon nanotubes to MP3 players is like comparing the transistor to a Radio Flyer wagon.
CNTs are like lasers. When the laser was invented in 1955 or so (someone correct me), it was billed as a "solution looking for a problem." No one knew what the hell to do with it. Naturally, it being the Cold War, most research money was pumped into Star Wars-style blasters...but now look at all the work done with lasers. Surgery, trace gas detection for pollution controls, CD players, DVD players, spectroscopy for materials science, the list goes on. The point is that CNT research is very early. Hell, nanotubes weren't known to exist until 1990 or so. This is one breakthrough out of about a billion or so possible with Carbon Nanotubes. Don't judge the technology based on the premise of "fancy clothing." Hell, the point of the link isn't the clothing part; it's the fact that a new fabrication method was invented that would improve production (and thus, deployment) of nanotubes by orders of magnitude. It's like finding a new way to make lasers on a broad scale instead of slowly making them by hand like in 1960. What you do with the plethora of nanotubes or lasers or what have you is up to you.
The link is kind of crappy. It's sort of hype-ish without real science, which coincidentally is the name of the journal whose latest issue is mentioned in the link as containing the paper describing the breakthrough. What a sentence that was...anyways, here you go. You should be able to read it even if you aren't at a subscribing institution since it's the latest issue.
It's worth noting that UTD has only been hard at work in CNT research for a few years. I was there in 2002 when the NanoTech institute was still being built. They had a bunch of Dells sitting outside the building with no one watching...but I guess they didn't worry. I mean, who steals a Dell?
It really depends where you are. My girlfriend and I live together and are both in Grad school. I'm a nano kid at Rice, she's a grad student at Baylor College of Medicine...we each make roughly $20000 after taxes. $40k is a lot for two young people, especially in a somewhat inexpensive (albeit crappy) city like Houston. So, 40k might buy you a week's worth of used toilet paper at Berkeley, but in the not-so-expensive places it goes quite far.
That's because Houston isn't Austin. Austin is tech-oriented. Houston is just trying to be. Perhaps that's why Austin has a "silicon hills" and Houston has enron, NASA, and the shitty workplace known as Compaq.
Or just work for defense labs/contractors. I used to work for one in Austin. The pay sucks, but nothing beats government work for laziness and lots of holidays! You could also try private defense. Didn't Lockheed recently win some big-ass contract from the Man to develop anti-MIG fighters? Should mean a lot of programmers needed to help out.
Can't find a job? Go to grad school. Get paid around $20k (30 with an NSF fellowship, although your chances of getting one are around 1 in 11), work your ass off, get fed up with your far superior peers and then get a job as an assistant professor who has to slave for 10 years before they get tenured! Woohoo! After all, for every Dilbert there's someone that's Piled High and Deep.
What you can do, seriously, is just attend grad school and look for a job while you're there. You have financial security if you're enrolled in a PhD program that pays you (like most sciences), and your resume looks better with the "Master's expected June 2006" at the top. You can always quit (even if your department will hate you) when you find a job.
Humorously, when Metroid came out a kid in my kindergarten class (Justin Bailey) said the code was named after him because he wrote so many letters to Nintendo.
Metroid Prime is one of those rare games that got pretty much everything right. The only thing missing was a more engrossing story, as that might draw you into the experience a little bit more, but that was minor. If Echoes is more of the same, then that's fine by me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But...there are notable changes such as the light/dark worlds and light/dark weapons, the echo and dark visors.
I've used Opera since 2000, so it took a fair amount to change. But it came down to names...Firefox just sounds way more badass than Opera. I hear it's the browser used by Frank Jaeger in Zanzibar. Snaaaaaaaaake!
Their server is certainly not cheerful anymore...perhaps because their stylish water-cooling system could not handle the deluge of Slashdot clicks, leaving behind an electronic trail of tears and thus flushing any attempts to RTFA down the toilet.
Why? Everyone likes an underdog. Bringing up the iPod is not a bad marketing idea. It makes the other music players look like Rocky to Apple's Apollo Creed (of course, Rocky does lose...). They could even preload "Eye of the Tiger" on all their players. I doubt Survivor cares - they're too busy with those Starbuck's commercials.
If there's anything that's going to kill the iPod it'll be its lack of Ogg Vorbis support...
That's true. I know that Apple's target demographic is definitely on the fence regarding Ogg support. Here's a sample polling question for someone in this key age group:
Q: So, what file types would you like to see supported in a portable music player? WMA? MP3? Ogg? A: Like, I totally thought Billy was into Jane 'cuz they were all like making out last night, that's what Katie told me but she has like this like weird thing in her hair and ohmygod! was that justin timberlake on TV! ohmygodohmygod I mean OMGOMGOMG! G2g brb ttyl!!!!1111 Wait...what's like an "ogg", and like stuff, you know?
Slashdot Mirror
You can thank the Supreme Court for that. Schools were allowed newspaper censorship as a result of a 1985 case concerning a newspaper wanting to publish an article about teen pregnancy. The case is Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. Some more info can be found here.
I'm making my girlfriend do that, see them all in numerical order. I'm pushing for a one night Star Wars-a-thon, but I think we'll have to settle on a movie-a-night deal and spread it out over a week. It's been three years of waiting (I decided to do this right before seeing Attack of the Clones myself, since I just found out then she'd never seen a single Star Wars). Unfortunately, she knows Vader is Luke's dad (stupid pop culture references), so that part kind of loses its punch. We'll see how this goes in late May.
Anyone see this on the iPod Shuffle page at Apple? Read footnote 2:
Do not eat iPod shuffle.
It's a reference to this image at the Apple site that shows the relative size of the Shuffle. This is almost as good as the whole "Cookies are a Delicious Treat" thing or whatever it is in Firefox.
There are 2 main reasons for Indian students to go into advanced degree programs (this info culled from my discussions with a number of Indian students):
1) Security - job markets are unstable, especially with just a Bachelor's...at least with a Master's or PhD you have a little more flexibility and aren't quite as easily replaced as someone with an MBA (even though the MBA's make a ton more money) This is also important for Visa-retention reasons.
2) It's an easier way to enter the US - getting a job straight from India is hard because of linguistic differences (Indians speak English very well, but communicating effectively still requires some American English) or because it's not that cost-efficient to interview someone halfway around the world when someone similar in skill is probably in the US.
I'm not from India though (second-generationer myself), so this is all just based on casual conversations with people. Take it with a grain of garam masala.
Grad schools, from what I understand (I went straight to grad school for various reasons) take work experience as sort of a bonus, if it's relevant. They usually just make sure your previous schooling was sufficient and that you somehow demonstrate through your application that you are capable of handling the rigors of grad school. It's almost more an evaluation of potential rather than actual merit, since a smart but lazy student is much much worse than a hard-working dumbass, because grad school is work, not just book smarts. I would beef up your application by mentioning any projects you worked on long term at your job, any self-motivated work you've done (in or out of work), etc...Also mention how you've stayed in touch with the computer engineering world (if your specialty is VLSI, for example, then maybe if you continually read the appropriate IEEE journal, mention that). I know a few people that went nuts during the dot-com days by getting all sorts of high-$ IT jobs, and then years later came back for an applied physics PhD. Good luck. Oh, and get used to the pay cut...actually, you're comign from India, so the pay will be about the same :)
If you care for these "ultimate" reinventions Marvel is fond of (I only like Ultimate X-Men, myself), then it might interest you to know that Orson Scott Card is writing Ultimate Iron Man when it debuts in March. I'm not sure how long he's signed up for, but I'd guess no more than 12 issues. See here for details. For those not up on comics, the quick summary is that the "ultimate" line is Marvel's way of restarting their characters from scratch so as to draw in new readers who don't want to fuck around with the 40 years of storylines.
I'm fairly certain CD sales are tracked based on unit codes/UPC's or whatever, which should be lacking on pirated copies. So...they won't factor into the CD sales figures. I think.
First Paypal then...eBay itself! Imagine being able to auction off iTunes songs you thought were badass but now think are just ass (I'm talking to you, Incubus fans) via the iTunes music store interface. Oh yeah, and Apple could control supply of super-popular songs to prop up its eBay side in a sort of DeBeer's-ish artificial price inflation mechanism. What? Little Miss Jailbait's latest hot-hot-hot single is burning up the charts? Too bad, only 100 people can buy the song directly. I guess this would be a good time for one of those trez-fashionable Slashdot "1)X 2)Y 3)?? 4)Profit!" sort of lines.
memory sticks are like flash drives, yes, but they are more expensive.
Like the Rio Carbon sells for less than the individual hard drives. Buy a large stock and the cost per unit goes down...same thing here.
I assumed the DS would tank since most people who like handhelds already own an SP, and the DS just seemed sort of awkward and gimmicky to me. But lo and behold, it's actually selling pretty well. So I'm just going to bite my tongue and let what happens with the PSP happen. I would imagine it would not sell that well since it is high-priced and faces a market that is already heavy in Nintendo handhelds (especially since it will come after the holidays and the new DS entry)...but what do I know?
By "in Russia" do you mean present-day Russia or "in Soviet Russia"? I think well all know what happens if it's the latter...
I'm thinking it has to do with the book deal. They have a (shitty) deal with some publisher that ran off somewhere, more or less, and I think they're in court to try and get out of the contract so they can get books out for the first five years of strips. I think.
Comparing Carbon nanotubes to MP3 players is like comparing the transistor to a Radio Flyer wagon.
CNTs are like lasers. When the laser was invented in 1955 or so (someone correct me), it was billed as a "solution looking for a problem." No one knew what the hell to do with it. Naturally, it being the Cold War, most research money was pumped into Star Wars-style blasters...but now look at all the work done with lasers. Surgery, trace gas detection for pollution controls, CD players, DVD players, spectroscopy for materials science, the list goes on. The point is that CNT research is very early. Hell, nanotubes weren't known to exist until 1990 or so. This is one breakthrough out of about a billion or so possible with Carbon Nanotubes. Don't judge the technology based on the premise of "fancy clothing." Hell, the point of the link isn't the clothing part; it's the fact that a new fabrication method was invented that would improve production (and thus, deployment) of nanotubes by orders of magnitude. It's like finding a new way to make lasers on a broad scale instead of slowly making them by hand like in 1960. What you do with the plethora of nanotubes or lasers or what have you is up to you.
The link is kind of crappy. It's sort of hype-ish without real science, which coincidentally is the name of the journal whose latest issue is mentioned in the link as containing the paper describing the breakthrough. What a sentence that was...anyways, here you go. You should be able to read it even if you aren't at a subscribing institution since it's the latest issue.
It's worth noting that UTD has only been hard at work in CNT research for a few years. I was there in 2002 when the NanoTech institute was still being built. They had a bunch of Dells sitting outside the building with no one watching...but I guess they didn't worry. I mean, who steals a Dell?
Other good links, mostly culled from the above Science article:
Baughman's summary of nanotube work
Smalley (the Nobel prize winner) and his CNT work:: He invented the HiPCO process for large-scale development of CNT's...from what I gather, fiber-spinning like the UTD method is a direct competitor.
A really good (and 46 page!) discussion of nanotube work
Strong Bad, in case you get tired of science.
It really depends where you are. My girlfriend and I live together and are both in Grad school. I'm a nano kid at Rice, she's a grad student at Baylor College of Medicine...we each make roughly $20000 after taxes. $40k is a lot for two young people, especially in a somewhat inexpensive (albeit crappy) city like Houston. So, 40k might buy you a week's worth of used toilet paper at Berkeley, but in the not-so-expensive places it goes quite far.
That's because Houston isn't Austin. Austin is tech-oriented. Houston is just trying to be. Perhaps that's why Austin has a "silicon hills" and Houston has enron, NASA, and the shitty workplace known as Compaq.
Or just work for defense labs/contractors. I used to work for one in Austin. The pay sucks, but nothing beats government work for laziness and lots of holidays! You could also try private defense. Didn't Lockheed recently win some big-ass contract from the Man to develop anti-MIG fighters? Should mean a lot of programmers needed to help out.
Can't find a job? Go to grad school. Get paid around $20k (30 with an NSF fellowship, although your chances of getting one are around 1 in 11), work your ass off, get fed up with your far superior peers and then get a job as an assistant professor who has to slave for 10 years before they get tenured! Woohoo! After all, for every Dilbert there's someone that's Piled High and Deep.
What you can do, seriously, is just attend grad school and look for a job while you're there. You have financial security if you're enrolled in a PhD program that pays you (like most sciences), and your resume looks better with the "Master's expected June 2006" at the top. You can always quit (even if your department will hate you) when you find a job.
Humorously, when Metroid came out a kid in my kindergarten class (Justin Bailey) said the code was named after him because he wrote so many letters to Nintendo.
Metroid Prime is one of those rare games that got pretty much everything right. The only thing missing was a more engrossing story, as that might draw you into the experience a little bit more, but that was minor. If Echoes is more of the same, then that's fine by me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But...there are notable changes such as the light/dark worlds and light/dark weapons, the echo and dark visors.
I've used Opera since 2000, so it took a fair amount to change. But it came down to names...Firefox just sounds way more badass than Opera. I hear it's the browser used by Frank Jaeger in Zanzibar. Snaaaaaaaaake!
Their server is certainly not cheerful anymore...perhaps because their stylish water-cooling system could not handle the deluge of Slashdot clicks, leaving behind an electronic trail of tears and thus flushing any attempts to RTFA down the toilet.
Why? Everyone likes an underdog. Bringing up the iPod is not a bad marketing idea. It makes the other music players look like Rocky to Apple's Apollo Creed (of course, Rocky does lose...). They could even preload "Eye of the Tiger" on all their players. I doubt Survivor cares - they're too busy with those Starbuck's commercials.
That's true. I know that Apple's target demographic is definitely on the fence regarding Ogg support. Here's a sample polling question for someone in this key age group:
Q: So, what file types would you like to see supported in a portable music player? WMA? MP3? Ogg?
A: Like, I totally thought Billy was into Jane 'cuz they were all like making out last night, that's what Katie told me but she has like this like weird thing in her hair and ohmygod! was that justin timberlake on TV! ohmygodohmygod I mean OMGOMGOMG! G2g brb ttyl!!!!1111 Wait...what's like an "ogg", and like stuff, you know?